Microsoft doesn't sell hardware (they sell phones but that is not what I am talking about). If you buy an apple computer then you will get the operating system and their equivalent to ms office suite for free (it might cost something but it is a lot less then office). You also generally can upgrade your OS when a new one is released without having to pay verses having to buy a license to upgrade to the newest version of windows/office when a new one comes out.

I don't think there is a victim here. You could say that Microsoft is the victim but they need to do a better job of protecting themselves. If/when the keys they sell are invalidated, the products will generally still work provided they are not checking for automatic updates (this should be an easy fix). Plus chances are their customers can afford to get "scammed" multiple times throughout the product life cycle before they would have spent more money on keys verses what they would have paid Microsoft.

I am not advocating that people either buy or sell these keys (I think it would probably actually be best not to trade these keys- but I am not anyone's father on here and cannot make this decision for other people) however I don't think they are scamming.

I am actually an Apple person personally.  

IMO Microsoft should take better steps to protect their IP if they don't want people selling MSDN keys like this. I also think their products are generally horribly overpriced and this high price probably factors in a certain level of activity.

Plus it isn't like people can't get around needing to have keys to Microsoft products at all - for example using Google sheets to open an excel spreadsheet

Well trust does have some level of value and the fact that it is sold does degrade its value (and is not something that I will generally engage in). However someone that does buy trust one way or another is going to have an incentive not to scam because if they are caught trying to scam then they will lose all the value of the trust they have purchased.

The key to people protecting themselves is to be sure that one person is not being trusted with more money (both your money and other's money) then the value of their trust. As long as they are being trusted with less money then their trust is worth then they will generally not scam.

Well having positive trust means that your account has additional value and there is no reason why you should not try to get all of the value out of something when you sell it, that is how a free market works.

There are plenty of non scam reasons to buy a positive trust account, the prestige of having positive trust, the ability to potentially offer your services that would only be able to be sold by people with positive trust, are only two reasons that come to mind.  

I think that since there is a clear conflict of interest with Vod in these cases since he has a financial interest in Microsoft that he should not be giving negative trust for the sole reason that the sellers are selling MSDN keys.

With the exception of fuckidolplus (I think he has pretty much dug his own grave) that Vod should remove the negative trust on all the sellers and then open a scam accusation against them with the reasons why he thinks they deserve negative trust and why he thinks they are scamming. Then anyone else who believes his argument (and not the argument of the people who say negative trust is not appropriate) and is in the default trust network will be free to leave them negative trust.   

^^^current high bid

Only ~5 hours remaining. Please note that there are no anti-sniping rules in place so a bid placed at the last minute will not extend the auction end time.

In the US you are innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. If you are going to claim he is breaking the law then the burden is on you to prove they are not legally obtained.

Oh gosh lol. I don't think anyone is going to take that feedback seriously.

I do like the ones where it says to check the reference for more details but then there is no reference.

It is spam but I am not sure it will get removed   

Lol thanks bae

1 BTC is a lot for a senior account, especially now with there being substantially more senior accounts then there were ~9 months ago. Granted it does have positive trust, but I don't think the positive trust adds that much value to accounts

I am guessing -1.76 to -2.00% this time around. My 'for bragging rights' bet would actually be -2.26 to -2.5, however that spot is taken and I am not sure we will drop more then 2.5%

I don't think you will be able to find anyone willing to pay .085 BTC for a member level account. Your starting bid is probably on the high side as to what member accounts are worth, and even the market price for members is probably too high considering that there are so few signature deals that accept member accounts right now

If you are asking if farming bitcointalk accounts is allowed, then yes it is. However you will need to be sure that the quality of the posts you make is good otherwise you will get all of your accounts banned.

I think it is somewhat of a moot point now as shorena has pretty much taken care of it, at least from a EU prospective, which has resulted in me firmly believing that the negative ratings are not appropriate and should not be seen by default. However if you wanted to strengthen your argument, then you could cite US anti-piracy law, and what exactly it prohibits and then analyze what the law prohibits verses what these sellers are doing. If you really wanted to put the nail in the coffin then you could do the same with Canadian law (Vod lives in Canada).

I think what Vod is doing with these sellers is very similar to me giving a negative trust to a competing account seller solely because they are a competitor of mine, or you giving a negative to someone who sells silver only because they sell at lower prices, or Smoothie giving a negative only because they are a competing coin dealer. In any of the above cases, it would be fine if any of the above gave a negative to someone that is actually scamming or attempting to scam (stunna does this all the time with his competition when he finds shady gambling operations - which is appropriate).

While I do agree that Vod has provided a service to the community for spending a lot of time tagging a number of scammers and potential scammers, I do not think this means that he should be held to any less of a high standard to be fair with his ratings.

Well he does say that the selling of the keys from MSDN subscriptions is not allowed. This implies that it is not allowed as per forum rules/the law. You had just mentioned that it is allowed per forum rules and that to your knowledge it is not illegal.

I was previously under the impression that selling these keys is against federal anti-piracy laws, however I have not been able to find anything to back this up to date. I have also been told that it is not against anti-piracy laws (also without reference). So it is really hard to say for sure one way or another if this is in fact against the law.

I also have not seen any concrete evidence as to what exactly happens once the keys are invalidated. If someone had purchased keys to Microsoft Excel for example, will they continue to be able to use it on an existing installation if they do not attempt to pursue any kind of update? (if possible please cite a source if anyone can answer this question).

My biggest concern personally is that there is somewhat of a conflict of interest. As per the quote below, Vod has said that he has a vested financial interest in Microsoft (full disclosure, I also own a moderate amount of MSFT shares personally). These sales obviously do negatively impact Microsoft's bottom line as they are not awarded the opportunity to realize the revenue they would receive from the customers of the people who are selling these keys.


The reason why this was even brought to Vod's attention was that Tomatocage had given negative trust to one of the sellers, which he removed after being told that it was not illegal (refrence).

I see that the address for the repayment had received a transaction of 1.1 BTC several days ago. I am surprised that devthedev has not returned your account to you by now. Have you actually sent a PM to him? You should be able to use the fact that the repayment address received the amount to repay the loan as enough to get your account back

Well if bob has 5 BTC that he wants to mask the ultimate source of the inputs, and he receives five 1 BTC outputs to five different (previously unused) outputs then, based on the fact that I know that a very high percentage of people that use bitcoin are not able to properly manage their security/privacy/ect., I would say that there is a good chance that he would eventually sign/broadcast a tx that contains inputs from the 5 output addresses that he received funds from. Even if Jane did not make the same mistake then an adversary could determine which of the outputs belong to Jane based on Bob's mistake. If you were to have a larger set of people participating in a transaction (say 5 or 6 people, with a total of 40 or so BTC being transacted, with 1 BTC outputs) then it would still be possible to determine which outputs belong to who if enough participants make a similar or other mistakes that would allow an adversary to determine which outputs belong to the person they are looking for (with a reasonable amount of certainty).

Any time you want to participate in coinjoin or any similar variation then you will need to use somewhat of a centralized service/meeting place that uses some level of automation. Otherwise it would take too long to find a sufficient number of participants and you would waste a lot of time in waiting for everyone to sign their part of the tx, and would likely have many instances when one or more of the participants will not sign the tx. As an experiment, prior to writing this post, I used blockchain.info's shared send (which should give a rough approximation as to how long a coinjoin tx should take), and it took roughly 2 minutes and 30 seconds from the time that I 'authorized' the transaction on blockchain.info and the time that my instance of armory picked up the output transaction, while this probably would not seem like very long, I would estimate that if you were to broadcast a transaction to an address that my instance of armory is "watching" then it would take my instance of armory only seconds to pick up the transaction.

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Although it is somewhat no longer relevant, I did take the time to find the article I was referencing in my previous post regrading the privacy of blockchain.info's shared send being broken, but for some reason I did not post it. So here it is

It is a free market, if he wants to accept that as collateral then he can.

I am willing to hold the account as collateral, however I do charge a fee of 1% or .0075 BTC, whichever is greater, payable in advance

Your account has essentially zero value. That is why shorena was not willing to lend you the 10 clams in the first place